> And you believe that having exactly one place inside ebuild text where
> there are different whitespace, quoting and indenting rules for
> something that otherwise looks exactly like any other metadata variable
> isn't going to cause problems?

In light of the fact that all 29758 ebuilds in portage already satisfy
the proposed whitespace, quoting, and indenting constrains on EAPI
assignment, the probability of problems appears to be vanishingly small.
And "vanishingly small" and can be reduced to zero by simply adding a
check to repoman.
Can you come up with a sane scenario under which an ebuild writer would
want to use a different syntax for setting EAPI?
-Alexandre